The Year I Stopped Being Invisible - 46. Chapter 46

Saw you flying by

Flash of turquoise blue

I just had to try

To keep your life in view

I came home from the Our Town auditions extremely upset. I was pretty sure I'd get a fairly big role in the play, so that wasn't an issue. Seniors usually almost always get the leads, so I wouldn't be the Stage Manager, or even George, but I was pretty sure I'd either be Mr. Webb or Mr. Gibbs, and would be okay with either.

No, what I was upset about was Taine's bizarre kiss-off.

My bird of paradise

sweet bird of paradise

"I knew I didn't really want the answer," I muttered to myself as I got cleaned up for dinner.

I scrubbed my hands in the bathroom sink, fighting tears as I remembered the taste of Taine's sweet lips, the silky feel of his skin as we showered together over at his house... his now-empty house.

Wish that I could fly

I'd be beside you now

But I can only sigh

And watch you circle round

I decided that washing my hands wasn't good enough, so I stripped off my clothes and got in the shower, turning the water up as hard and hot as it would go.

It burned my skin, but as I stood there in the punishing torrent, I barely felt it at all.

My bird of paradise

Sweet bird of paradise

Numerous emotions roiled and battled within me. Sadness, anger, heartbreak, self-pity, fear, pain.

Mostly pain.

I sank down to the floor of the shower, my skin turning bright pink and steam filling the bathroom, and I wept.

So you fly away

When will you come again

So I can watch you play

In the pouring rain

I wept for Taine, for myself, and for the mournful memory of that magical third...that fragile being called Us...may he rest in peace. I would grieve him until the end of my days, I thought, as I stood and let the scalding water wash my tears away. I knew that as certainly as I knew anything.

My bird of paradise

Sweet bird of paradise

I turned off the water, dried myself with a fluffy blue towel, and got my clothes back on for dinner. As I combed my hair in the mirror, I caught sight of my red, tired eyes. I look like an old man, I thought. I certainly felt like one. A lonely old man of fifteen, doomed to be without the love of his life forever.

* * * * *

When I went into the kitchen, Tynah was already seated and Rex was putting the finishing touches on his famous stuffed bell peppers in tomato sauce. Heidi was sitting at Tynah's feet, her cute little dachshund face all scrunched up into a look which pleaded, "you're gonna give me some of that food, right, Mommy?"

"How'd dancing around the maypole go, Whod?" asked Rex, with a mix of sardonic dismissal and genuine interest. He was hard to read sometimes.

"It was okay," I said.

"Did you get to play Tinkerbell?" he asked, ladling Tynah's food.

I smirked, but Tynah was getting upset.

"I think that's just about enough," she said sharply. "Leave Rick alone, Rex!"

Rex looked puzzled as to why Tynah was upset, and as for me, well, I was used to his ribbing.

"It's okay, Tynah, we're just joking around," I said, hoping to ease the tension.

Tynah looked from me...to Rex...to me...to Rex...and the color began to rise in her face.

"I'm just joshing him, Darly-Doo," said Rex.

"Yeah, it's okay," I added quickly.

Tynah looked down at her plate. She was turning beet red.

"Oh...," she said quietly. "Shit."

There was a pause, and then she repeated herself, and then again. Her volume and anger were rising with each repetition until they reached a hysterical, screaming crescendo.

"Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Just SHIT. Just SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!"

She swept her plate to the floor angrily, and it smashed, spraying bell pepper, ground beef and tomato sauce across the tiles and against the bottom of the refrigerator. Tynah stood up, and her chair toppled to the floor behind her.

Instinctively, I flinched, although I knew intellectually that she was the mother who didn't hit. My subconscious didn't register that fact, however, and I cringed, adrenaline and panic coursing through my body.

Tynah ran from the kitchen toward the bedroom and I heard the door slam shut. Rex and I just looked at each other, mouths hanging open for a second in mutual astonishment. Then Rex picked up her chair and my eyes grew wide as I saw Heidi trying to lick the food off the floor.

"Rex!" I yelled. "Stop Heidi! Broken glass!"

Rex immediately scooped Heidi from the floor before she could ingest any of Tynah's dinner, which was intermingled with sharp, lethal pieces of her broken plate. Heidi yipped and, of course, peed herself. Rex stood there rooted to the spot, his bare foot splattered with tomato sauce and pee dripping from the nervous puppy in his hand. I rushed to get some dishrags to help him out.

"Don't move!" I said. "You'll slip or cut yourself."

I cleaned up the floor as best I could, then took Heidi from Rex's hand and took her into the garage to clean her up. Rex washed his hands in the garage utility sink next to us, muttering curses and imprecations under his breath.

"First thing you do, Rick," he said. "First fucking thing you do...go out and get married. It's a fucking treat."

* * * * *

I lay in bed in my room trying to concentrate on my algebra homework. Why was everything so fucked up all of a sudden? How had this happened?

Screaming at the window

Watch me die another day

Hopeless situation

Endless price I have to pay

I wasn't crying anymore, at least that was a plus. No, I wasn't really sad so much as actively pissed off. Since the summer, my mother had abandoned me, I was practically raped, I put a guy in the hospital, then he had his friends murder my dog and trashed my ex-boyfriend's dad's car. Then, just today, Taine had blown me off forever, Tynah had gone batshit crazy at the dinner table, and Rex was drunk in the garage cursing his lot in life. Why was my life so insane?

Sanity now it's beyond me

There's no choice

This had always happened to me. Everything just seemed to be going right for once, and then it all went hopelessly nuts.

Like when I was thirteen, almost fourteen, the summer before last. I tried not to think of that day, when I'd still been in middle school and my happiness was again shattered by craziness.

Diary of a madman

Walk the line again today

Entries of confusion

Dear diary, I'm here to stay

It was July, 1980.

Everything finally seemed to be going okay for me. My birth-mom had stopped beating me once I got to be taller than her, I finally started getting some friends at middle school, and we did everything together. I had plans almost every day of the summer with them, except for this one.

So I decided to go downtown and see the Alamo. I really wanted to see some of San Antonio's past, which we had studied the previous school year in 7th grade Texas History class. I biked over to Rex and Tynah's house from our apartment in Universal City, about ten miles away and just outside Randolph Air Force Base, where my mother worked as a secretary. Tynah liked the fact that I wanted to learn about history, so she gave me a ride up to the mall across from Polk, where I caught a VIA bus downtown.

After a few hours of walking around the Alamo and soaking in its history, taking the official tour and then poking around myself, I walked outside into the blistering hot Texas sun. It must have been 100 degrees that day, so I quickly found a raspas vendor and purchased a big, blue coconut-flavored raspa. They were basically Sno-Cones with exotic tropical flavors, and I had always been partial to coconut over some of the more eclectic selections (mango, papaya, and tamarindo, which I didn't even recognize at that age). The cold, icy treat felt good on my tongue.

Manic depression befriends me

Hear his voice

Sanity now is beyond me

There's no choice

I crossed the street to a row of shops, wandering aimlessly and taking in all the new sights. I stopped at a bookshop, dedicated bookworm that I was, and quickly became immersed in their window display, which featured several books about horror movies which called to my genre-addicted soul. The bookstore was in an old stone building which sat next to a narrow back-alley strewn with garbage and litter.

There were a few steel trash-cans way down at the end, and a couple of fire escapes from the bookstore and the building on the other side of the alley.

I thought I saw a cat moving behind one of the trash cans, so I began walking down the alley, happily licking my raspa in my brown and white striped t-shirt, blue cotton shorts, and blue canvas sneakers. Oblivious to the fact that I looked like something out of the beginning of a horror movie, I moved blithely toward the dead-end at the back of the alley, curious to make the kitty-cat's acquaintance.

A sickened mind and spirit

The mirror tells me lies

Could I mistake myself for someone

Who lives behind my eyes?

I didn't even hear the older boys until I was almost at the end. One of them began making a sucking sound between his teeth and lips, and I turned around to see my passage back to the street blocked by three rough-looking guys whom I guessed to be in their late teens.

Two of them -- whom I guessed to be Mexican-American brothers, perhaps from Oaxaca -- had premature dark mustaches and nine-o'clock shadows, with prominent Mayan features. They were wearing identical black leather jackets, white t-shirts, rolled blue jeans and black work shoes. The third boy -- the one who was making the sucking sounds -- seemed to me to be Native American. He had no facial hair, but sported the high, angular cheekbones and hawk-like nose which I recognized as tribal only from history books. He wore a brown suede vest with long fringes over a bare chest, white jeans, and incongruously fancy black patent-leather dress shoes.

They advanced down the alley toward me, three abreast like in some demented action-movie trailer, and one of the Mexicans was laughing a humorless laugh. The other one pulled a knife from his jacket and held it out at his side, twirling the long, thin blade in the air. The knife was what I would later hear Nathan refer to as a "pig-sticker," a slender stiletto which had been modified from a switchblade.

I'm fucked, I thought. And, as it turned out, that was about to be true.

Literally.

I stood there, a skinny thirteen-year old kid in childish shorts and a thin t-shirt licking a Sno-Cone. It was obviously, in retrospect, a predator's wet dream. The Indian and the laughing Mexican were stroking the crotches of their respective jeans, and I could see that they were boned up. The one with the knife was boned up too, with no stroking required. I could see no escape, as the three of them effectively blocked the alley.

Just then, the scruffy black cat bolted between the armed Mexican's legs and fled toward the street. I watched it go, dearly wishing that I could follow.

Will he escape my soul

Or will he live in me?

Is he trying to get out

Or trying to enter me?

"What do you want?" I asked in a tremulous, terrified voice. My own voice seemed distant to me, my field of vision began to narrow, and my hearing starting to become muffled as the blood rushed against my eardrums.

"Your sweet ass, little white boy," said one of them, I don't remember which. The raspa fell from my hand, landing on the dirty asphalt with a wet splat, the blue slush melting almost instantly in the oppressive heat.

I backed up as they began to close the gap between us. Frantically, I turned around, looking for escape. Both of the fire ladders were pulled up too high for me to reach, and all I could see was the steel trash cans and a filthy brick wall behind them. Then someone grabbed my hair from behind and slammed me face-down onto one of the trash can lids. It made a loud metal crash, but didn't really hurt except for the edge, which caught me just below the ribcage.

Voices in the darkness

Scream away my mental health

Can I ask a question

To help me save me from myself?

"Why are you doing this?" I managed, as one hand held my right shoulder while the other tightened its grip on my hair, roughly smashing my face into the greasy, dirty lid of the trash can.

"Shut the fuck up!" was the answer, as the hand on my shoulder retreated, returning with the pig-sticker and pressing it against my throat, just under my jawline.

"Keep your fucking mouth shut, greymeat!"

Greymeat? I thought crazily. What the fuck was a greymeat?

My shorts and underwear were then savagely ripped down my skinny young legs, and I could feel the hot, stagnant air hitting my bare bottom. What I felt then...well, let me backtrack. When I said earlier that Jeff's entry was the most painful thing I'd ever felt in my life, I wasn't exactly lying. For one thing, I was under the influence of sensation-enhancing drugs when I was at Jeff's house about fourteen months after what happened in that alley. For another, Jeff was huge down there, and these guys weren't. And, finally, I think that by the time the first of them -- the Mexican with the knife -- ripped into me, I was probably in a state of shock.

That's not to say that it didn't hurt. Because it did. A lot. And it seemed to go on forever, although I think I may have lost consciousness once or twice. The first one was fairly quick, with short, savage thrusts which tore my flesh and made me bleed. When he grunted out his climax, his grip tightened not only on my hair, but on the knife. I was afraid that he would be so carried away that he would stab it through my neck by accident, but he didn't.

He gave my trembling body a shove into the trash can as he pulled out, and I laid there bleeding and gasping for breath. My stomach was knotted up, and his fluid burned my internal wounds. I turned my head, tears streaming from my eyes, and saw the little blue puddle of my melted raspa a few feet away. I focused on it, although I still screamed as the Indian tore into me, earning me a brutal punch in the side of the head which made my ears ring.

"Shut your fucking mouth," the Indian said, and then grabbed my hips tightly with both hands and began thrusting in and out of me with long, hard, excruciatingly slow and painful strokes. His thumbs dug into my kidneys as he held me in an iron grip. The Indian made it last a long time, and was ramming into me so hard that the trash can tilted forward and my feet left the ground, earning hoots of appreciation from the Mexicans watching him rape me.

After what seemed like hours, but was probably only about twenty minutes, the Indian came, bucking his hips into me so hard that I was afraid the trash can would tip over and deposit me face-first into the pile of wet cat shit in front of me. He rocked back, forcing me back down until my feet touched the ground again, and pulled out with a sticky popping sound which made my stomach turn.

The Indian said something, and then I heard the Mexican who had been laughing step up behind me. He was still laughing, and slapped my ass really hard about five or six times. Then he buried himself inside me with one flesh-ripping thrust, causing me to cry out again, only this time with not nearly as much volume or energy as before.

Then he grabbed a fistful of hair at the back of my head and began slamming my face into the trash can lid, hard, punctuating each thrust with a face-slam and some words in Spanish -- which I didn't understand -- mixed in with English obscenities. I felt something let go in my nose, and blood began to run into my mouth as he slammed me repeatedly into the dirty steel lid, which had tipped by now and was hanging half inside the trash can and half out.

"Fuck, culero, fuck!" he shouted, laughing and raping and smashing my face into the lid over and over again until everything started to turn grey and the coppery taste of blood filled my nose and mouth and I could only see the melted raspa and the cat shit and the bloody, greasy lid of the trash can and then I slipped away into blackness.

* * * * *

I awoke with dark blood crusted all over my face, and had to slowly pull my cheek from where it had been bonded to the brown, viscous mess on the trash-can lid. I looked to see if the boys were gone, and they were. I laid bent over the can for a moment, trying to feel whether anything was broken.

Probably not, I thought dimly.

My face was a mess, and my insides were shredded, bloody and raw, but I didn't think I had any broken bones. I stood up slowly, using my hands on the edges of the trash can to steady myself. I felt some tenderness under my ribs, and lifted my shirt to see the area red and blue, already starting to bruise. I was sure it would be black by nightfall.

What time is it? I thought, as I stepped out of my shorts and briefs, using my underwear to wipe the bloody, semen-soaked miasma from between my butt cheeks. When I had cleaned as much as I could, I deposited the gory rag into the trash can and pulled up my shorts. I checked my watch and saw that it was almost six in the evening. I wouldn't get home until after ten, but I couldn't bring myself to call anyone just yet.

My legs felt wobbly, like they were made of rubber, and my anus hurt with every step as I slowly walked toward the street, eyes glassy and shell-shocked, past the wet stain on the pavement which was once a happy blue raspa.

By the time I got back to Tynah and Rex's house, my mom was there, and everyone was very upset because I hadn't called. I told them that I had missed the bus and hadn't been able to find a public phone which worked. Tynah was so heavily suburbanized that she bought the story instantly, and everyone else seemed to go along with it.

I could tell that my mom was mad as we loaded my bike into the back of her 1973 Plymouth Duster and drove back to Universal City, but I knew she wouldn't beat me. I'd just get the silent treatment for a few days, and that was fine by me. I was just thankful beyond words that I didn't have to ride my bike home ten miles with what was going on in my behind. My shorts would have been soaked with blood by the time I got home, if I managed to even ride that far.

* * * * *

Now, fourteen months later, I laid in my bed at Rex and Tynah's house, replaying the rape in my mind for the thousandth time. Why hadn't I called the police? Well, the best description I could have given at the time was "two Mexicans of average height, average build, and no distinguishing marks, and a guy who could have been Native American." Oh, yeah, "they all had black hair and dark eyes." That could match about two-thirds of the population of San Antonio at the time.

Also, I just didn't want to talk about it. I still don't like to talk about it. Because I started developing a complex about it. Did they know I was gay just by looking at me? Did I do something to provoke them? Did I want them to do it?

Well, of course now I know the answers to all of those questions was "no", but it's pretty typical for survivors of violent sexual assault to go through all those mental gymnastics of blaming themselves, and that's what I did.

There was one more set of questions that was part of that complex, however, and it didn't have such an easy answer, especially considering everything which had happened before that rape, and everything which had happened since. Particularly in light of what had happened in the last few months.

Was I just doomed to a life of perpetual insanity and violence?

Was God mad at me because I liked other boys?

Was the fact that my conception was an accident somehow cursing me to eternal trials and tribulations?

Was my soul lost?

Would I just continue to suffer and suffer and suffer again, until I finally couldn't take it anymore and gave in to that voice that told me to end it all?

I listened to the sounds of Tynah and Rex angrily banging around at opposite ends of the house until I finally fell into a restless and troubled sleep. And the next morning, I woke up as usual and began getting ready for school.

Enemies fill up the pages

Are they me?

Monday 'til Sunday in stages

Set me free